Election system could use a shake-up

The balloons, posters and confetti had not yet been swept up, or crying towels laun­dered, when talk turned to 2016 candi­dates. Good heavens, could we not have a few months' respite?

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Posted Nov. 26, 2012 at 8:52 AM
Updated Nov 26, 2012 at 8:58 AM

Posted Nov. 26, 2012 at 8:52 AM
Updated Nov 26, 2012 at 8:58 AM

» Social News

The following editorial appeared in The Hart­ford Courant:

The balloons, posters and confetti had not yet been swept up, or crying towels laun­dered, when talk turned to 2016 candi­dates. Good heavens, could we not have a few months' respite?

But as we look forward, as eventually we must, shouldn't we talk about a better election system? What would such a system look like? Here are some ideas put forward that bear consideration:

A shorter campaign season. The campaign­ing season that concluded on Nov. 6 felt as if it had been going on since the Johnson administra­tion – and not Lyndon, Andrew.

Across the pond, Conservative Party leader David Cameron ousted Labour's Gordon Brown as prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2010 after a campaign that lasted one month. Here, as Chicago lawyer Gerald D. Skoning observed in a 2010 letter to the Chicago Tribune, the presidential campaign season officially begins in January of the election year, but really starts at least two years earlier with exploratory committees, campaign fundraisers and book writing. He acknowledged that a one-month campaign might be extreme for American tastes, but how about, say, six months?

Have elections run by a national nonpar­tisan agency, as many other democracies do, so that all precincts are using the same equipment and same methods. (How can Florida still be screwed up?) While no system is perfect, coun­tries such as France, Germany and Canada do not, as author and former presidential consultant David Frum has observed, have politicians of one party setting voting schedules to favor their side and harm the other, or moving voting places to gain advantages for themselves.

Take a tiny percentage of advertising money as a tax to run the voting system. If we must ensure a tsunami of false and negative advertising, augmented this year by the Citizens United sewer of cash, let's at least get something for our trouble.

On the other hand, the money doesn't seem to have bought widespread success (see: McMahon, Linda). Could it be that the electorate is tired of having its collective intelligence insulted?

Bring early voting to all 50 states. It in­creases participation and cuts back on the crowd on Election Day. A sample poll of voters waiting nearly an hour to vote in West Hartford on Tues­day found strong support for early voting. State leaders should take a very close look at Oregon's mail-in voting system.

In a recent letter to the NewYork Times, former Oregon secretary of state (and Yale graduate) Phil Keisling, in office when his state adopted vote­-by-mail in 1998, said voter turnout in his state is often the nation's highest, and voter fraud and other mischief is infinitesimally small.

A constitutional amendment is in the works here that would allow such reforms as early vot­ing.

Don't start the campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Making two small, very white states the kingmakers distorts the process. Would the country be awash in ethanol if Iowa didn't have a lot of corn farmers?

A better alternative to this anachronism was presented in 2005 by James Baker and former President Jimmy Carter.They proposed split­ting up the nation into four regions and having regional primaries — alternating the order of the regional primaries every four years. Something like that.

Electoral College. We'd also like a national dialogue on whether to keep the Electoral Col­lege or replace it with direct popular election of the president. Making the candidate who gets the most votes the winner would have the immediate benefit of spreading the presidential campaign to all 50 states, instead of a dozen battleground states. Small states will argue that this will simply draw campaigns to large population centers. But how much attention do most small states get now?

Will any of this actually happen? We are opti­mistic about early voting in Connecticut.